This morning, I was disgusted at some of the comments about immigration on this
front page post. Late afternoon found me cooking dinner, or supah as we'd say here in Maine, wondering why it still disturbed me to hear so many people wanting to deport people who have obviously broken our laws.
As I pondered immigration and snapped the tough ends of a bunch of beautiful asparagus, I began wondering who's hands had picked it. The asparagus was the embodiment of a spring that still hasn't got a grip here in the northeast corner of the US. I checked the two rubber bands that wrapped it, and sure enough, "product of California," was stamped on them. So there's a really good chance that an illegal immigrant from Mexico harvested my asparagus.
Now I realize that most of you have never harvested asparagus. I have. I grew up on a farm, we were poor, and we all worked to survive. But we were rich to have an acre of asparagus. It provided all the asparagus my family could eat and freeze, and more still for me to sell by the side of the road. This was my spending money when, the following fall, I took our cattle and horses to the fairs through
4-H. It meant money to ride the rides and eat french fries and play midway games.
I've cut a lot of asparagus. You scramble along on your knees, bag in one hand, cutter in the other, and carefully cut each stem an inch under the soil. After collecting a handful of spears, you carefully place them in your bag so that you don't damage the tender tips. Cutting an acre took me about an hour, working without pause. And though I was strong and used to hard work, an hour was about all I could take of it. I suppose it's possible that they have a mechanical asparagus harvester now, but given the vegetable's tender nature, I don't see how, and I've never heard of one. So my assumption is that a person cut and packaged my asparagus. And that person may well be an illegal immigrant, a guest worker, a seasonal worker, an immigrant worker; call him or her what you will, they are the person we debated in that front page post this morning.
Now I'm going to switch gears, and tell you a little bit about my husband's family. Both his parents are the children of European immigrants. His dad fought in WWII, went to school on the GI Bill, and became a successful businessman. They were upper middle class.
With success, his parents felt it important to give back. They are my ideal of what good Republicans are, and I wish the world had more people like them. One of the charities they support is called Friends of the Orphans, in particular an orphanage about 20 miles outside Mexico City. They used to go there every year. One year, they told of a trip they'd taken with the priest who ran the orphanage, a trip to the Mexico City Dump.
There were families living there. Hundreds of people, including little children. They had no access to clean water to drink, let alone to wash with. Little food. No schools. No medical care. All they had were each other, they were and still are families, and in Mexican culture, family is first. The priest told my in-laws that he wished for a bus. Then, they could bring the children living in the dump to the orphanage each day, feed them, bath them, educate them, give them medical care, and take them back to their families each night.
My father in-law came home and tried to raise the money for a school bus among is friends and business associates. He didn't have any luck. So he went out and found a good used bus, had it overhauled, and taken to the orphanage on his own. Though he's not mentioned, the Friends website says this about the program on the What Makes us Different page:
· The Milpillas Garbage Dump near Miacatlán, Mexico, is home to over 100 families.
· Each day, children from this area are bussed out of the dump to the orphanage where they are offered educational programs, fed, bathed and provided much-needed medical care.
Now there are a lot of other reasons I'm opposed to shipping illegal immigrants home without careful thought.
But as I looked at the asparagus, romaine hearts, baby spinach, pine nuts, fresh rosemary, and apples that I used in the meal, I realized that any one might have been picked by one of those children who lived in the Mexico City dump; picked by a child who went to the orphanage to bath and eat and learn in a bus my father-in-law purchased. If even one of those children dream of a better life for his or her family then that of living in the Mexico City dump, and entered this country illegally to make that happen, I do not have the heart to send them back.
I welcome them.